Elaborate Parallels
by LondonBelow
Summary: [aida fic] Two boys grow on opposite sides of a war, but when their lives meet a middle ground begins to form. A story about Radames and Mereb's... friendship, sort of.
1. Radames' Fear

Disclaimer: Aida is... well, it's probably part Elton John and Tim Rice's, part Verdi's, but it's not mine. I'm just writing for fun.

My father was a calm man. Things that made him feel what other men call anger led him to exude a sense of calculated self-control. Even when tired, even when confronted by my mother when she grew angry and hurt and yelped and cried, he controlled the situation. He informed of the future with such calm certainty there was no doubt that his word would be enacted.

It was under such conditions that he led me from my room one night, his hand tight around my arm. His free hand held the lantern aloft. "I am going to cure you of this… malady," he informed me, "I am going to make you whole once more; I am going to save us the humiliation of a degenerate child."

I was so lost trying to follow his words that I stopped crying. "Father…?" Then I asked a stupid question: "When is Mama coming home?" I knew what everyone meant when they said she had 'gone away', they meant she was gone in the never-coming-home way, but a part my childish need ignored this tiny fact.

"Your mother is dead, Radames." Keys scraped, and my father swung open a heavy door. "So there will be no one to ease your transition to manhood. Which given current conditions will likely prove difficult," he murmured. Then he hurled me down the steps, into the darkness.

"_No!_"

I scrambled out of the dirt and climbed the stairs rapidly, using my hands to push myself upright every few steps. My knees were stinging, raw, nothing helped by the addition of dirt. They wouldn't hold my weight, but that didn't matter; the space of light between the door and the jamb was rapidly diminishing.

I reached the door just in time to hear the lock fall into place. "No!" I pounded with my fists. The wood did not give. "Father!" He didn't answer but that his footsteps grew more distant. I pounded again, as hard as I could. Blood began to slam against my flesh with equal ardor, and after a few minutes I stopped hitting the door.

He wasn't coming back.

"Father…"

I didn't call to him after that. Instead I cursed him with the strongest terms I knew. I put my finger in my mouth and bit down at the joint. I would _not_ cry. I refused him that satisfaction.

For a long time I sat by the door. It was solid, and at least I could feel with some certainty where I was rather than wandering blindly through rows and rows of barrels—it was the wine cellar, my prison. He locked me in a place that is dark and cold, a place I had never before seen. So, lost, I held close to that I knew as if it might fend off the growing dark. This was where my father had last been, and this was where he would come again to free me.

But after a while I was sitting still with nothing but aching knees and a cold rear. I got up. What would happen if my knees became infected? Would I lose my legs? I'd heard stories of that happening to men in the army. Still, at least those men had their chance to _be_ in the army, rather than catching rot in their fathers' wine cellars.

The first thing I did, after the shock wore off, was take inventory of my pains. My arms and legs throbbed where they had hit the stairs, but everything was in working order. My head hadn't been hurt—I tucked it as I fell, and the memory filled me with pride. It decreased the pain of being considered a degenerate. Other than a few scrapes and bruises, I was fine.

I left the door. It wasn't so dark, really, after a while. There were dim shapes. I picked my way towards them. When smooth wood met the palm of my hand, I searched the barrel for some kind of opening. I found none. I began to pound instead, slamming the same place again and again. When my hand was tired I shift the barrel and kicked at the same place with my foot.

A crack!

Barely a trickle of wine emerged, but it was enough. I pressed my lips to the barrel and sucked off the dribble of alcohol. It was my first taste of wine, and the alcohol burned in my throat and tasted of ashes, but I didn't care. I guzzled until I had to pull away to gasp for air. Then I returned to suckling at the wine barrel.

It might have been a pleasure to drink myself into a stupor. Already the alcohol made me warm and dulled the noises of the dark cellar. But the crack was near the top of the barrel. Rather than turn the barrel, I wriggled a finger into the hole, pulled it out and rubbed alcohol over the tears in my skin. It burned. My teeth clenched over a hiss as I coated the broken places again and again, until my eyes stung with tears.

Then I began to hit the barrel again.

I awoke the following morning to a nudge in the ribs. My father stood over me, holding his lantern aloft and frowning. I scrambled to my feet.

He plucked at my shirt, and I blushed with shame at the large purple stain. Father shook his head. Before he turned and walked away, this time leaving the door open, he left me with words that rendered me immobile:

"You disappoint me."

_to be contiued!_

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	2. Do It Again, Mereb

Disclaimer: Aida is... well, it's probably part Elton John and Tim Rice's, part Verdi's, but it's not mine. I'm just writing for fun.

The summer I turned eight, my sister Dua and I liked to play in the palace courtyard. I can't say why; maybe because it had four walls and a tree and a pool so that at any given moment there was at least a spot of shade. Maybe because even Dua, who was quite possibly the stupidest person in the world (a quality largely influenced by the fact that she was five years old) sensed the importance of the place. Or perhaps, perhaps we chose the place because every day for the past eight years first I then we had watched Father make his way down the sandy paths to the glorious job that allowed our family to enjoy an easy life.

That day, Dua was sitting on the steps of our home, fastening on her sandals. I leapt the stairs, sandals in hand, and ran a few paces to stop from falling. I might've kept going had Dua not called to me: "Mereb, Mereb!"

I stopped and whirled. "What?"

"Do it again, Mereb!"

In her small repertoire of phrases, this one featured prominently. She pointed to the stairs. "Do it again!" the brat demanded. I ran with all haste back towards her, leapt up the steps, then turned and leapt down them again. Dua laughed and clapped her hands.

"Come on," I murmured. I knelt and hurriedly sandaled her feet. "Come on, come on!" I said. It wasn't late but it was _hot_. I wanted to go play. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. Dua could run almost nearly half as fast as I could, by which I mean she ran very slowly. I would have broken ahead of her and run the entire way, but she kept a tight hold on my hand, and anyway she was trying.

When we reached the courtyard, I handed her my little toy boat to play with. She put it in the pool and knelt beside it, narrating stories in her head. I used to nag her to tell me the stories. I would poke her ribs and say something like, 'tell me where you sailed to today or I'm eating your dessert'. Dua didn't do normal people things, like talk.

I scrambled up into the tree while she played with her boat. I climbed into the branches. Three formed a nice seat where I could sit in the shade. It was still hot, but not directly hot, just a sort of enveloping heat. I closed my eyes and sighed, and did not wake until I hit the ground.

"Oh, dear."

Someone stood above me, a girl a few years older than myself with two thick braids and a pretty smile, even though she wasn't smiling. Her face swam amid the shifting leaves. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"I… think so."

"Can you stand?"

"Stand what?" I asked. "The heat? Clearly, no." I stood and brushed myself off. My body hurt _everywhere,_ but I wasn't about to let her know that. She was a girl—and what's more, she was pretty.

She laughed. "You're Henu's son, aren't you?" she asked, and I nodded. "It's nice to meet you. He's always talking about you. I'm Aida."

"Aida Amosnero's so—daughter?"

"The same."

"Mereb, Mereb!" Dua was standing behind Aida, hiding from her. "Mereb," she said, when I was paying attention to her, "do it again!"

Aida smiled, and I smiled at her, thinking this might just be one of the best days in a long time.

And that was when a handmaiden rushed in. "My lady… you must come with me."

Aida looked at me, then at the handmaiden. "What's happening?"

"Come," the handmaiden insisted. She took Aida's arm and hustled her out of the courtyard. And then we heard shouting. We had probably heard it before and thought nothing of it, but in my memory the day was silent until that moment. Then it was shouting and strangers boiled into courtyard. I pulled my sister into a far corner and crouched low.

"What are they?" Dua asked. I put my hand over her mouth.

"Shh." Maybe they would pass us by. They were military, I could tell that much from their identical uniforms, but not our military.

Suddenly all the quiet talks my parents had after Dua and I were put to bed made more sense. Suddenly I was curled close against the stone walls of the palace, listening to shouts and the sounds of things being broken, the sound of footsteps. Then a hand tightened around my arm. "Captain!" someone called.

Dua was pulled away from me. "No!" I struggled, wrenched at my arm, but the soldier just grabbed my shoulder. "You'll only hurt yourself," he warned.

"Mereb!" Dua yelped. Another man held her off the ground. She kicked at thin air and cried. "Mereb!"

And at that moment I thought nothing was worse than the fact that I couldn't help her.

The captain emerged from the palace. This was not the decent Captain the army would have years later – and even I call him decent and damn all Egyptians to the worst punishment the gods can imagine – but a cold man who took one look at me, one look at Dua, and said, "For this one, the copper mines. Kill the other."

"No!" I screamed, and I kicked out, this time landing a solid one against my captor's shin. He swore and released me; I ran to the man who held a knife against my sister's throat—but time did not stop, it did not wait for me. I reached the soldier as he flung my sister's body to the ground. And then I kicked him, hard. I kicked his shins and pummeled his stomach with my fists.

He cracked me on the head with the butt of his knife, and I woke up on a ship bound for Egypt.

_to be contiued!_

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	3. A Quest for Radames

Disclaimer: Aida is... well, it's probably part Elton John and Tim Rice's, part Verdi's, but it's not mine. I'm just writing for fun.

I overheard much during my father's frequent meetings with the other ministers, although admittedly few were held at our home. Those that were, I overheard curious things. Around the time I was ten or eleven, the meetings began to concern largely something called Nubia. At first I thought Nubia must be a person, since the ministers said such things as, " Nubia will not relent" and "Our friendship with Nubia may require severing." And then it changed to things about, "The time approaches to invade Nubia," though they argued much about precisely when this time would occur.

One day, when my father excused himself for a moment I slipped into the meeting.

The ministers looked to me. "We have no need of your services," one minister said. Perhaps the fact that I carried no wine had gone unnoticed by these so-called intelligent men.

"What is Nubia?" I asked.

"None of your business, boy," was the first answer I received.

The second answer was, "It's a nation south of Egypt." The minister who said as much pointed it out to me on a map—not a very good one, though, I noticed. It looked like something I could've drawn, the rough borders of Egypt and other places, the Nile and the sea.

"Oh." I leaned up on tiptoe to see the map better. "And we trade with them?" I asked.

The minister who had been kind now smiled at me. "Yes," he said, "we do."

"Why would we want to harm them, then, if we need them to trade with us?" I asked. It didn't seem logical to me. Isolating them would just lose us whatever resources they had that we wanted.

The kind minister chuckled. "If we had the power of Nubia we would have their resources, too, and not need to trade. We would also have control of the second and third Cataracts. We would open the Nile to our rule," he said, and traced the Nile with his finger.

I frowned. There was a piece of information here I didn't understand, a piece of information I needed to understand all the others. "Sir… please… do we like Nubia?"

"In matters of politics, that is of very little importance."

"If we asked nicely, wouldn't they let us use the river?" I wanted to know.

"No, they would not."

"Why?"

"Because they could gain something by withholding. It would give them an edge in trade, do you see?"

"Why can't we just share?" I asked. "That way everyone's happy."

"That is not how politics works." Zoser lifted me off my feet and moved me a few feet back. "Run and play, Radames, or make yourself useful, boy."

"I want to learn more about Nubia," I protested. _Wouldn't_ that make me useful? Other boys my age were apprenticed to their fathers, like Bes, a boy I had played with years before. I only saw him now at market. His father made sandals and now he did, too.

Zoser gave me a shove towards the door. He had a way of shoving that looked gentle, that made me look clumsy when I stumbled and fell. I pulled myself out of the dirt, blushing painfully, and fled the room. The last thing I heard was the voice of the minister who had been kind to me asking, "Was that truly necessary?"

I paused. Zoser said, "The boy's been nothing but an embarrassment since his mother died. He's, ah… not all right in the head. I am sorry for the interruption."

I left the house. I had no idea where I was headed, only that I was _going away from him_. I wasn't going to play—who would I play with? Zoser knew I had no one to play with; Zoser had seen to it that no one wanted to play with me. He told all the other adults that I wasn't right in the head and let word leak to the children; they all enjoyed a laugh at my expense. There goes Zoser's stupid child.

I wandered that day. I wandered to the Nile and followed its shore. Where the path veered away I walked instead through sand. I heard the birds calling and saw how the water shimmered if you looked out of the corner of your eye. The weeds grew thickly, sometimes so thickly they blotted the river from view—I was only a small boy then, and achieving heights greater than my own took little effort, even for plants.

Then I unlaced my sandals. I held them in my fingers, leaned forward and ran. Sand gave and flew up in wheels behind me. I raced against nothing, running until in the heat of the afternoon I moved so quickly a cool wind formed around me. I ran until my legs began to burn, and then continued running until they refused to support me and I toppled over. Grains of sand stung my arms and legs, but the collective sands shifted to build me a berth.

I fell asleep there, along the Nile's edge.

Hours later, I awoke. It was dark now, but warm still, Egyptian warmth. The moon hung low in the sky and surfed the surface of the Nile's now-dark waters.

I picked myself up from the sand and brushed off my arms and legs. It was dark, and I was far from my home. As I stood I recalled how it was said among men that the Nile leads to the sea, and the sea leads to all lands. I could follow the Nile. I had proved that today. I could follow the Nile to the sea and go to any land I chose! I was free. Freedom swelled my lungs like too much air and made me dizzy. I could go anywhere I chose, do anything I wanted.

I could see the secrets of the Valley of Kings!

I could swim to Elephantine!

I could find what this _Nubia_ truly was. In that moment I imagined myself speaking to the Nubian Pharaoh (because all lands have Pharaohs… right?) and telling him we really wanted to use the river, and he would agree. I would return to Egypt a hero! Everyone would love me, even Zoser! _Especially_ Zoser, and even more he would be _proud_ of me.

It is in this mind that I set out towards Nubia, at least where I thought I would find Nubia. I trudged, carrying my sandals and wishing I had something to drink. I was spared, at least, the heat of the sun, which would have melted me, but the air made my throat dry and sticky. My sides cramped.

In two hours I saw dwellings, buildings, low and solid. Nubia looked so like Egypt! I was bent and panting, but seeing Nubia I straightened and ran. Soon the sands gave way to streets. I marveled as my feet traveled a familiar path. Was this Nubia? It looked so like Thebes!

Perhaps I was as foolish as my father counted me. I did not realize until I arrived at his house what I had done.

Zoser whipped me like a dog for running away. I was just happy that he cared.

_to be contiued!_

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